Dev Blog 10 – Character Art

It’s very exciting times here at Empyrean Interactive. We have just wrapped up our prototype milestone and we’re finally able to spend time on building the game out!

This brings us to a sneak peek of our very first (Work in progress) female avatar. We are still in the process of trying to define what we want our characters to look and feel like, but we do know that we want characters that are diverse and filled with personality. Take a look at our female avatar concept art:

There are a few things we kept in mind while we were creating our character concept. We wanted to stay away from anything that has a high level of detail and complexity, this is because we believe that designs should be functional and everything should serve a purpose. This applies to every part of the character, including fabric and facial details.

“Simplicity and boldness, thoughtful design over complexity for the sake of it” – Brent.

We’re working alongside an amazing art house to create our 3D avatar model, at this stage, we’re not 100% in love with how the hair looks. Right now we feel that the hair is too flat and a bit noisy with photo realistic textures on top, also the way it connects to the head is off (see gif above). Here’s a look into how we typically give feedback and work with the art house to help bring our vision to life.

First we attach references of the style we want to achieve:

We also provide feedback that’ll help them achieve the look we’re going for:

(examples )

We feel that most of her hair should be covered in the sculpt, the strip modeling on top should be for additional flair.

Her hair should be separated from the head mesh, it should also have good volume and clean, readable forms from a distance.

Please avoid photo textures on her hair, we want to see it look painted or sculpted.

Our ultimate goal is to create characters that exude personality and individuality, we want you to be able to take a look at a character and imagine a realistic backstory for them. We’re hoping to drive this visually by having a range of distinct facial features and expressions that’s unique to each character. To do this we need each character to feel real and believable within our environment.

Leave a comment on your thoughts about how everything is looking so far! Have a great 4th of July!!